The Republican Party is bracing for a truly open convention where anyone can emerge as the presidential nominee.
In a Friday briefing with reporters, RNC officials emphasized that the 2016 nominee would be chosen at the convention by its 2,472 delegates, to which the primaries and caucuses were “preliminary” events.
“The convention, as we all know, is where the nomination gets decided,” an RNC official said. “Obviously, in recent decades, the preliminary process, which is the primaries and caucuses, have produced a presumptive nominee prior to the convention, but that’s just a function of the math of how candidates have done in the process. Convention delegates are the ones who decide our nominee.”
The comments come at a time when Sen. Ted Cruz appears poised to win the state of Wisconsin, increasing the likelihood that front-runner Donald Trump will end the primary process short of the 1,237 delegate majority needed to win the nomination on the first convention ballot. This week, Trump came to Washington to meet with RNC chairman Reince Preibus to discuss the delegate process, and the RNC also launced a website aimed at addressing questions about the convention.
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The officials also noted that the rules governing the convention nomination process will likely change before the next nominee is chosen.
“Each convention is not just an event but an entity. It is a body of delegates that will elect, that will adopt its own rules, that will likely be different than the 2012 rules,” an RNC official said. “These rules change every cycle, and so there’s nothing unique about that. The delegates to this convention will decide what rules they want to govern themselves.”
With the scramble for delegates and specualtion about a contested convention the most serious it has been in the modern era, focus has turned to a previously obscure rule adopted ahead of the 2012 convention requiring a candidate to win a majority of delegates in at least eight states to even be considered.
Were that rule to stay in place, it would almost certainly mean that Trump and Cruz would be the only two candidates eligible for nomination — at least during the first round of voting. But RNC officials are preparing the public for the possibility that this could easily change, as could the number of states in which a given candidate currently has a majority of the delegates.
The officials said speculation about which rules would change amounted to a “nifty academic game.”
“We have no idea which candidates will have a majority of how many states because most of the delegates haven’t been elected yet,” an RNC official said. “And so just winning a majority of bound delegates in a state is not the equivalent of having a majority support of delegates in a state. So it’s all conjecture. It’s premature. We’ve still got about 20 states to go in this process so we don’t know where that ends up.”
The RNC officials said it’s important to separate the “allocation” and “selection” processes of delegates. Despite approximately two-thirds of the delegates having been already allocated to candidates based on state rules, an RNC official noted that as far as the actual individuals who will actually be attending the convention in Cleveland, “barely 10 percent of the delegates to be selected have even been selected yet.”
All of these uncertainies could pave the way for a candidate other than Trump or Cruz, perhaps one not even in the race, to emerge as the nominee.
This week, former President George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove espoused the idea that an outsider not actively seeking the nomination could emerge victorious at this summer’s convention.
In considering such an action, Republican delegates will have to weigh their desire to pick a candidate other than Trump or Cruz against the risk of a massive populist backlash against the idea that party insiders would be choosing the nominee, disregarding the preferences of primary voters.
To prevent such a scenario, the active presidential campaigns are stepping up efforts to make sure that the actual individual delegates going to Cleveland will be loyal to them, because if no winner emerges from the first round of voting, most delegates become free to vote for whoever they want.
The RNC has been stepping up its public outreach to prepare voters for any possibility.
